There's something almost mesmeric about A BEAUTIFUL FAMILY. A seemingly gentle story about a summer vacation in the mid 1980s, sunbaked, old fashioned, quiet, New Zealand based, told through the eyes of 10 year old Alix. It's a time of Walkman's, Dolly Magazine, cassette tapes, crosswords and jigsaw puzzles. Although there's an air of simplicity and innocence about all of this (and nostalgia for those of us who were there at the time), there's also something bubbling along under the surface.
Is it a distracted mother, trying to write a novel, or a distant father and the tensions between them? Is it the tension between two sisters, one content with her Walkman and the young boy she befriends who is also holidaying in the area, the older sister becoming more interested in makeup, friend groups and boys than the family is necessarily aware of? Or is it the slightly creepy neighbour, who is lurking around in the background?
Then there is the obvious mystery, the disappearance of young Charlotte in the same area a couple of years prior. A disappearance that young Alix and her friend Kahu are determined to solve. Which leads to some wonderful moments of family and community through the eyes of a child becoming aware of the imperfections of adults. We probably all remember the moment - a seemingly perfect father says something recognisably daft, a loving mother finds interests outside her children, a community seems unaware of the small things happening right in front of their eyes, which often leads to a more rapid growing up than somebody like Alix was originally expecting.
Cleverly presented as a gentle, almost lulling story, A BEAUTIFUL FAMILY prods away at family secrets, teenage rebellion, the kind of intense friendships that can be formed at young ages, sibling rivalries and adults behaving in a highly suspicious manner right in front of a lot of other adults seemingly content to ignore the implications.
Beware though, this is a story which doesn't end with all the threads neatly tied off, which, in the opinion of this reader at least, fitted absolutely perfectly with the entire style.
A Beautiful Family
Over the course of one sunbaked summer vacation, a family is pulled into a web of mysteries that the younger daughter sets out to solve. A tense, page-turning debut of childhood, innocence, and evil.
At ten years old, she catches more than her parents and older sister suspect. Over their summer break, her mother plans to finish her novel, her father wants to grill and watch cricket, and her fifteen-year-old sister hopes to catch the eye of a local lifeguard. With everyone around her distracted, she teams up with a new friend to solve a mystery that haunts this vacation they'll close the case of what happened to Charlotte, a child who was presumed drowned two years earlier.
But things aren't quite as they seem, and as the children look for clues, they inadvertently dislodge information they wish they'd never uncovered. Are her parents happy together? Is her sister putting her trust in the wrong people? Is their vacation rental as safe as it seems? And when someone else goes missing, the family find themselves at the center of an urgent police investigation.
Debut novelist Jennifer Trevelyan viscerally captures the confusion and frustration of childhood, the fraught but unshakeable bond between sisters, and the dangers that lurk in the white lies we tell--especially about the people we love most.
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